What Catholics are Saying About these Times

I understand that we Catholics should be out on the peripheries serving the poor 24/7, but occasionally Catholics get time to go for a pint and have a chat. If the Holy Father wants to know what some are saying or at least thinking, the video above is a pretty good example. The most troubling aspect of this papacy with regard to the FFI and the message that it is sending around the World to Catholics is that we are now entering into a period of thoughtcrime. That's the 'Francis Effect' currently being felt by many Catholics who are the Holy Father's natural supporters.

Guilty as charged!

That's a most troubling aspect of the Franciscan oath, but so too, equally, is the pseudo-revival of the index of banned books for all publications from the FFI. I still own a copy of 'Jesus: Our Eucharistic Love' by Fr Stefano Manelli. It's brilliant and inspiring. Maybe you can still pick up a copy second hand but hide it at home in case it is seized by Fr Volpi.

Yet, no heretical Bishop has been asked to sign an oath that condemns the 'syllabus of errors' that have swept the Catholic Church in the modern World. How many dreadful, heretical books that have undermined or destroyed faith have been written by Catholics since the 1960s. These still reside in pride of place in many monastery libraries despite the well-observed fact that these destroy or deplete Faith!

No other Order or religious house has experienced the ire currently being suffered by the Franciscans of the Immaculate. Nothing has happened to the heretical and ludicrous LCWR, despite their quite apparent departure from the Holy Faith, the Magisterium and widespread movement 'beyond Jesus'. Every day brings some more news that sends shivers down the spines of those who are, in fact, the Papacy's most loyal supporters. It is only the heretics and unofficial apostates within the Church who have ever viewed the Papacy as something that needs to be overcome, overturned, or seized, so that its power and Office be reduced to something that makes the Office holder of the Papacy just another weak and ineffective Bishop among an empire of weak and ineffective Bishops.

Not a Pope's usual 'constituency': The vociferous gay lobby

The Popes natural 'constituency' of loyal support are those who uphold and defend the Magisterium and who are loyal to the Sacred Tradition of the Church. Even more naturally the constituency of the Pope, one would think, would be those who see the Second Vatican Council in a 'hermeneutic of continuity', because it is, as Dr Joseph Shaw makes plain, not evident at all that this Council rejects outright that which came before it. It is, one would have thought, expected of each Pope to uphold the Magisterium and to guard faithfully and teach that which has been handed down.

If anything comes in a Supreme Pontiff's job specification, one would think that would be it, as he 'strengthens the brethren'. The only people I see being strengthened at the moment are those who hate the institutional Church, whose concept of worship and the Mass is divorced from anything that our forefathers would understand, heretics and Catholics for whom the actual doctrinal content of the Church - the Deposit of Faith - is a massive problem that needs to be removed, or, at least, covered up. Even Obama has heralded His Holiness! When a Pope strengthens these people, who have no interest in converting to the Faith of Jesus Christ, and alienates his natural supporters and most loyal and faithful sons and daughters, it becomes obvious that he is hanging around with the wrong crowd.

If what has happened to the Franciscans of the Immaculate becomes a Soviet clampdown that goes general then one shudders. History has seen many tyrants abuse, destroy and decimate their own people while maintaining sky high opinion poll ratings. It is not the way of Christ but it is the way of the World. One needs no reminding of just how popular these figures were, while the purges and the persecutions of innocent people were going on.

How many Marxists, for instance, good Heavens, have been thought of as 'good people' until the monsters take the apparatus of the State into their hands and begin their diabolical reign of genocide and terror? Most Marxists are 'good people', until, that is they are given any kind of power and authority and the real intent and real agenda of this abhorrent and Godless creed becomes evident. Are the Marxists at the UN and the Bertrand Russell school of Fabian socialists 'good people' while still desiring to eliminate poverty, by eliminating the poor from the face of the Earth? Are the cultural Marxists who promote the breakdown of the natural family and marriage 'good people'? Marxism is not just "wrong", but has such a track-proven record of trampling on all manner of human freedoms that means that this ideology of death warrants greater condemnation than merely "wrong", as if it is merely in someway intellectually deficient, or sociologically mistaken.

Yet - and yet - none of us desire to be Pope, but wish only that the Pope be a true Pastor and Father to us, rather than to the World. Are we to be the children rejected by our Holy Father Pope Francis because since Francis has been placed in authority over us, who are we to reject him? We cannot! Tu es Petrus. Are not those Franciscan friars and nuns his most natural supporters and loyal sons and daughters? Your Holiness, why beat your own children?

Pat Archbold today has an open letter to His Holiness asking, pleading for him to show mercy to the Franciscan Friars of the Immaculate and all who hold fast to the Sacred Tradition of the Church. Protect the Pope, whose natural leaning is to always seek to protect the Pope is evidently concerned that there are good and holy men who need protecting, if not from the Pope himself, then the men of ideology that the Pope has brought in with him to oversee what appears to be, after nine months, the attempted demolition of the Catholic Church from the inside. Do those working or seeking to destroy the Papacy and the Church have no fear of God?

The truly breathtaking thing, is that all of these things are being said by faithful Catholics and we are only nine months into this papacy. Our Lady of Fatima has promised that this story ends well and happily for those will persevere to the end, but that does not make the days in which we live less evil, nor does it mean that we are bound to cease proclaiming Salvation, and nor, indeed, does it mean that silence in the face of injustice is suddenly transformed into something holy and good merely because those who perpetuate it are in great authority over us. No Catholic I know is calling for insurrection or revolution against those placed in authority over the Universal Church. The concern is rather that the real insurrection and the real revolution is taking place in Rome itself and, what is truly incredible is that the revolution is being televised.

"The only danger the church can and should fear is the sin of her members."

~ Pope Benedict XVI